February 18, 2012

Celebrity Cognoscenti, or This is My Body, Offered for Me

Speak directly, or in this case, write with some satirical sense, and you're likely to be called angry. I reviewed Sacrilege! in the last post. It's not a good book. You can read the review for yourself if you haven't already. Reviewing books is something I do in my "spare" time. I don't get paid to do it, and typically, I don't take a great deal of joy in skewering a book. This is not to say that I won't engage in a certain gleeful mockery of what passes as good these days, but as with the case of Matt Mikalatos, I've learned that there are usually good people behind the efforts.

Matt responded when I ass-raped Imaginary Jesus. Hugh Halter also responded when I gave a less vicious review of his book, the main weakness of which I thought was simply boring writing. Here's Matt's opening salvo after reading the review:

Yup, I'm nice. And no need to apologize for tirades. As it happens I'm a fan of well-written tirades and to be honest I enjoyed reading yours. Reading between the lines I gather that you did not enjoy my book, but I hope that you at least enjoyed disliking it.

And, now, here is Hugh's response:

Hey Greg Horton, after reading your colorful review of my book, I thought, 'that dude must have put some time in as a pastor of a church." Only ex. rev's get that pissed off. Looks like I was right. Well, thanks anyway for drawing some attention to the book. Peace out,

Matt and I began a conversation that lasts into the present. Hell, he even sent me a manuscript of his second book prior to publication to review and make suggestions. He even took some of them. Matt doesn't necessarily understand himself to be a celebrity. Hugh on the other hand thinks I'm angry. See, his book doesn't suck; I'm just pissed because I used to be a pastor. The fault is with me, not the writing. This is the tactic we most often find with two distinct types of spiritual leaders: the spiritually abusive (which I'm not saying Hugh is, as I don't know him wel) and the celebrity. We'll focus on the latter.

The rise of celebrity in Christianity isn't necessarily new. Evangelists have been packing stadiums and churches since well before John Wesley's time. John Chrysostom allegedly preached to overflow crowds in the 4th century C.E. What Chrysostom and Spurgeon and Wesley had though, was a commitment to the exposition of a text combined with a life that was committed to a holy praxis. Their celebrity was based on a life offered in sacrifice and the corresponding moral authority that comes with such a life. Billy Graham is the best modern equivalent, I suspect. In other words, it was a celebrity based on something substantive.

Modern celebrity is fundamentally different. It's manufactured via a marketing process, and it's largely based on subjective responses of audiences. I remember when Lifechurch.tv first started and people kept saying to me, "The pastor looks like Tom Cruise!" There was zero substance to his preaching, but an image that resonated within the swooning hearts of young women helped solidify him as a good speaker. The goal of most marketing efforts is some sort of bottom line: money or souls or both. Perhaps even something as ephemeral as a concept like success. To create a successful marketing strategy, at least two primary things must be known: a commodity and an audience.

I have no intention of revisiting all that has come of Church Growth, Willow Creek, Saddleback, and now multicampus movements, but suffice it to say that these movements borrowed heavily from business marketing. The first thing I have to know is what I'm selling. That is the commodity. The Church is full of answers to the question: Roman Road, Four Spiritual Laws, Prayer of Jabez, Fully Devoted Follower of Jesus, and a dozen other empty signifiers. The most pernicious is "the gospel message," some variation of creation, fall, incarnation, atonement, salvation, sanctification, usually with me as the focus of Jesus' sacrificial death, the complete individualization of the Christ event tailored to an audience of 7 billion unique individuals. Jesus came to save YOU.

Celebrity leaders are terrible leaders. I'm sorry. They are. The metric used to measure success has nothing to do with any metric that ought to measure success in a field not concerned with bottom lines but with faithfulness to an ethic and a person. Determining if I'm faithful to my wife does not require counting the number of people who listen to me tell them I'm faithful to my wife, nor is it in any way related to convincing other people that they too should be faithful to their wives. Ruminate on that a bit.

Celebrity leaders are also the worst about surrounding themselves with satans, those accusers of the brother who insist, like the Devil's Advocate in a canonization investigation, that we bring everything, beautiful and ugly, to the table. They are supposed to remind the leaders that they are not the incarnate Word of God, but are in fact, mere mortals who will conflate their sermons with God's Word if someone doesn't hold them accountable. (You know who I'm thinking of, right? Reverend Sex Freak!) They are supposed to say, "It doesn't matter how big your church is; the metric is faithfulness"—a modern way of saying, "What does it profit a man..."

The problem with celebrity in Christianity is twofold. First, Christianity ought not have a commodity. That megachurches and well-meaning "authors" and itinerant evangelists have made a commodity of the "gospel message," is shameful enough. If there must be a commodity, it probably ought to be Jesus. Unfortunately, that requires a whole different "gospel message" and one predicated on praxis, not marketing strategies. However, the second problem (and the larger one) with celebrity in the Church is that the celebrity becomes the commodity. This is clearly true in the multicampus movement, wherein egomaniacs decide that when Jesus said "shepherd," he obviously meant gigantic talking non-incarnate head on a video screen hundreds of miles from the shepherd. In the case of megachurches and multicampus churches, the commodity is the avatar of the senior pastor, broadcast weekly on video screens on campuses around the country. The leader is the commodity, thereby guaranteeing a ministry based completely on idolatry or blasphemy.

Marketing is a practice too, designed to impose on people's attention to try to extract their money. Megachurches et al more subtly impose on parishoners' finances in order to extract their attention. Thus American churches have managed to turn the ambient culture upside-down while reinforcing the worst flaws and excesses of capitalism. Genius. It's as though they took the parable of the seeds less as a reminder to sow on fertile ground and more as an exhortation to carpet-bomb every square centimeter of land with seeds.

As much as I try to avoid theology, I have to admit that churches that don't view preaching as a Dungeons & Dragons style magic compulsion spell seem not to fall into this trap as often. If you actually have faith that God automagically changes the hearts of everyone (or a critical mass of people) you recite the right collection of syllables in front of (read: you have faith that God will forever shield you from the consequences of not giving enough of a shit about other people to get to know them), there's no reason not to model your ministry around what has worked to enrich the shareholders of the world's most exploitative corporations.

When I went to church, we always had a mini-sermon about the importance of tithing before the bucket went around. I was often troubled by this; the idea of a mini-sermon was appealing, but I did not believe that it should always revolve around the same subject. I know that my church wasn't the only one to follow this practice.

Greg, I really appreciate your point of view here. I'm a pastor who believes Jesus was about the restoration of all creation and not just any individual's personal salvation. I believe the call of Christ is a call to participate in a much bigger story than what we typically hear taught in Western Evangelical circles.

But that story is more nuanced than the Roman Road or the 4 Spiritual Laws. Which means it takes investment in the lives of others to tell it, show it, live it, be it, and act it out. Our church has chosen not to make Jesus into a divine commodity. It's good to see that people outside of the church understand how important this is.

I don't know that I'm suspicious of tithing in itself - any corporation (if a church owns its building, it will have incorporated) has bills to pay. It largely depends on what the money is used for. Cutting-edge AV equipment, bandwidth and campus expansions don't exactly build better communities.

I never liked the idea of having a ceremonial assembly for anything. If you're teaching a class, great. If you need to have a planning meeting, fine. But Catholic and Episcopalian rituals are as meaningless to me as the three-song-and-a-prayer routines of the CofC. But I'm an outlier there, as far as people go; most people see some point in enforced boredom shared experience that I have never been able to.